Corporations and other entities typically have employees who incur costs. These costs may be tracked and paid from a centralized system. For example, some employees may travel and incur hotel and airfare costs, wherein other employees may incur costs in supplying the company with various office supplies. These costs are often incurred in the form of a charge to a credit card or charge card. In some cases, the credit card charges incurred by the various employees are sent to the company on a periodic basis in the form of a statement which may be in a paper or electronic format. Corporations often desire to automatically import an electronic statement with a computerized accounting system.
With reference to FIG. 1, in the prior art, an organization, such as financial institution 102, generates electronic files on a periodic basis, wherein the files may include reports of charges incurred against various accounts. For example, a credit card company may generate a report every month detailing all of the transactions incurred by a certain credit card. A company 104 may have numerous employees, each with a credit card. Each credit card may have transactions that are reported on the electronic statement. Company 104 uses a computerized accounting system 106 to simplify the accounting process, wherein the accounting system may include any one of the many software accounting systems available, including those made by SAP, ORACLE, PEOPLESOFT, JD EDWARDS, LAWSON, WALKER, BAAN, GEAC, and many others. Because of the wide variety of accounting systems used by company 104, each using its own proprietary format, it is difficult for a financial institution to provide financial data to each company in an optimum format for the entity's accounting system. In the prior art, the data 108 from financial institution 102 was typically in a generic format that must be reformatted by each company 104 before being used by accounting system 106. Such a reformatting process typically includes a computer programmer developing a sophisticated computer program 110 to translate data from the format used by the financial institution to the format used by company 104. Such a software development process can be time consuming and expensive, including months of work and the attendant costs of paying for custom computer programming.
Such a process is cumbersome because, for example, a company may have multiple accounts from different financial institutions, each possibly using a different format for its statements. The company then needs to create a custom program to create an interface with each different financial institution. In addition, many companies have grown their businesses through the acquisition of other companies. In these instances, a company may have more than one accounting system, often from different software companies. The company then needs to create a more complex custom program to create multiple interfaces from a single financial institution to several accounting systems. As such, it would be desirable to have a system in which an entity can more easily import information from a third party such that the information can be more efficiently processed via computer.